Did have alot of fun playing the Kinect at my friends house. I could never get one because I have 7 ft ceilings in my basement so I would have to spend thousands on repairs and hospital bills after playing a game. Not going to shell out money just for voice commands, Im gonna want to play some games.

Hopefully the people that have them can get some quality games within a year.

How is that working out?. Not saying Sony was wrong. Just that I think M$ is still in a very good position to refocus on Kinect if they find something useful to add as they were able to push out a decent number of units in that first year and people are still buying the full package.

@angel you're partially right. I got the day one xbox. I didnt mind paying the entrance fee for a kinect bundle. Now i would never buy a kinect game unless it was mind blowing, and if ms said they would develop for it then they better put something out. I have a feeling it will see some use in combination with holo lens. It also has other uses like in deadrising 3 or bf4 and forza i believe. The majority of my friends use it to navigate the xbox. Not to mention all the annoying kids going xbox record that during mp matches lol. I agree that it should be supported more with games though.

Its working out for Sony just fine. Those that own the camera are using it to make streams which you can find countless of on YouTube. Also the device itself isnt very expensive so there's that as well. Not to mention its required for Morpheus so I can imagine plenty more will get sold due to that device.

Pretty cool to see the PlayStation camera used in conjunction with Morpheus. That in my opinion is a good way to implement a camera into core games.

Sony is perfectly planning it's camera. if it all works out with VR? This was the perfect Trojan horse to sell their camera with it. VR should have been Xbox plan from the beginning if they wanted to sell kinect as mandatory. Then at their conference explained it is mandatory because of upcoming VR tech added to it's console. Actually Sony could have forced their camera on us explaining this with Morpheus.

@Bigpappy, it is working out fine for Sony, they made it 100% optional, never forced it upon gamers and it works as advertised, it is not as advanced as Kinect but that does not matter to your point.

I bought a PS4 camera, after doing some research and I am extremely happy with it, it provides me with many optional extras I wouldn't get without it. But optional and not forced onto the consumer is the big thing.

So yeah, as an optional accessory that was never needed to be heavily marketed and was only advertised to enhance your PS4 experience without it being necessary at all to enjoy all the core, important and main features and benefits of your PS4, it's working out very peachy for Sony.

I had zero interest in the Kinect on the 360 so I never owned a 360 Kinect. However, since I bought the Titanfall Xbox One bundle that came with Kinect even though I didn't think I'd use it, I ended up loving the extra dynamic that goes along with the system. Things like "Xbox record that" or "Xbox play Titanfall" to me is really cool. I don't think it should have been bundled in from the start but I think in the next Xbox they should incorporate the voice control within the system itself and forget about the motion controls. Would make sense since Microsoft is using Cortana in Windows 10 devices and Xbox One is getting it in the NXE update.

I just want more games to allow you to create a stylised version of yourself with Kinect. Like the Kinect Sports Rivals "champions", but tailored to the artstyle of the given game. Sunset Overdrive would have been a good candidate.

They could do that without needing to compromise in-game performance at all, but they don't. The only thing my Kinect is useful for is pausing and resuming videos when the controller has turned itself off.

You can easily make an argument for Kinect being more promising, or at least more interesting than Xbox One hardware. What can the Xbox One hardware do that is new? What can it do that the Playstation 4 or PC can't? Sure, Microsoft have some good software engineers bring features/games/services, but the tech itself isn't particularly exciting.

Kinect has failed hard and Microsoft have clearly kerbed it (despite what they say), but the tech still stood as something different, and enabled some unique experiences. Something you can't really claim for the standalone console.

Having said that, Azure is Microsoft's most promising AND most interesting tech in recent years. Wouldn't say "ever", as they have quite a storied history. Hololens ranks above kinect too, for it's potential outside of gaming.

I hate Kinect games, I love what Kinect can add to games, the Battlefield head tracking, The nevermind (or something like that) heartbeat sensor which makes the game harder the faster your heartbeat (horror game, obviously), the Alien isolation head tracking and noise detection where you have to stay quiet or risk alerting the alien. Next gen they should sell Kinect at a cheaper price (separately) but allow limited voice navigation integrated into the hardware/headsets themselves to get the benefit of navigating the UI with your voice without the need for Kinect. I think it’s a great piece of kit, and it does have a lot of potential. Devs just need to realise that Kinect games are usually poor, but (optional) features in games using Kinect have thus far proved very fun to use

First time I played Battlefield 4 on the Xbox One the head tracking got totally messed up by my headset. Unfortunately the first thing I did was hop in the drivers seat of a boat ready to storm a beach, with passengers in tow.

Of course my camera wrenched up and right, giving my a rotating view of the skyline that I couldn't overcome. I'm certain my squadmates were really pleased to have jumped on the boat that kept crashing into the sides of the carrier while everyone else went into battle.

The first straw was Gears 2 online sucking balls. The second was Kinect being shoved down our necks. Sold my 360 soon afterwards and haven't had a MS console since. Nothing has enticed me to make the move back. I also enjoy the hell out of PSN being quieter than Live. It started to get weird the amount of children telling me that they were going to bone my female relatives.

"Most promising" is exactly why it failed. They made lots of wild promises for it that it was never going to keep. The article does a good job of summarizing many of the exact points some of us were making from the very beginning, which anyone with even basic technical knowledge should've seen.

Kinect is a fantastic device, but without any real pairing with a physical control system it just will not work very well just by itself as a control system for hard core game control methods.

Microsoft tried to make it work all as a single control method by itself for not just The UI but also for games, but just like the R&D team over @ Sony found out in 2004 about cameras being even with 3D depth sense, and fine joint mappings and trackings of the human body it still lacks the sensations of physical impute that the person would need for hard core gaming.

Microsoft messages up to the point was Kinect would be the future controller for such , but not until much later found out that it just does not work, and even though combining a xbox360 game pad combined in with Kinect solved most of the problem's, by then it was too late to change the perceptions of the product.

All of those years in R&D I think helped Sony be able to avoid such a problems because they worked out a way to do so, Microsoft's Kinect with a Lighted controller would do the same thing for the Xbox one with kinect's advanced 3D depth sense camera being even more advanced than the playstation eye it would do even better, but again Microsoft would have had to do such , they still can if they wanted to invest into making Kinect even better for hard core game controlling impute method that is wireless and is not game pad or KB&mouse method.

Their initial marketing message was what hurt Kinect in the long run by boxing in the product without including a physical control method to go along with it.

Even if so much as just lighted arm and leg bands were used for a person to wear that the Kinect could than track and AR like powered Armor over the body of the gamer, in game it would be more precisely be able to track even hit locations even better for the Ai to gather data on the player for body movements and in a game for gladiatorial combat would be really tough Ai.

But again Microsoft would have had to change the message of Kinect about it being the controller for your games. It would need to be Kinect+ a physical controller to work for hardcore games.

In VR today both OCRift and Project Morpheus's wireless control methodology work in tandem with camera optical sensors and their HMD's. And Since OCRift could indeed work with Xbox one with further tweaks, maybe we will see this pan out. So Kinect could get new life breathed into it from OCRift. But we will see though.

Now this is proper thinking for use of the device. On it's own it's basically just a controller. Not that good if one at that. Paired with Vr it is an entirely new console to game on. Kinects true use in the future of it's technology is as add on controller feature to VR.

Thank you for the props, and you are correct, see the Kinect can already track body movement and joint locations on the human body, but what it needs is tandem in conjunction with optical focal points that the camera can combine with your VR. Like the Motion capture suits but with the parts of the focal points that track those locations what also would be usefulness would be for VR & AR think about smart room meshed tags like these lil bad boys in and around a room.

Like any camera/microphone device the Kinect can only track what it can see and hear. This may be ok for some sports and casual games but games were you have to rapidly select things are still best suited to mouse and keyboard or controller.

Rapid selection in gaming has always been the preferred method to date otherwise the game starts to get boring. The only thing that would possibly be better would to actually have a device that could read your mind and even if there was a relatively cheap device to do that it may not be practical.

Consider this. When playing a game you need to press a certain button to fire a weapon or just jump. This can easily be done with a physical controller but to do this with something like Kinect you would have to move your body, hands, legs or even fingers in a certain way, however this can get exhausting very quickly.

Likewise if you had something that could read your mind you need to teach your brain to think in a certain way and allow for some redundancy such as "I want to 'jump' but that girl I met last night was really hot and I would like some cola". Easy with a controller but very difficult otherwise.

i pull out the kinect and my 360 when my young nieces come over and we have a great time. It also had good hoe workout programs thta I enjoyed. I went from the 360 to ps4 so I do miss kinect - that was the selling pint for me on the xbone but all my buddies went ps4.

Oh please. Lets not exaggerate here. Its most promising product ever is not a camera device. If it was it would have worked out. It flopped twice already. Its a PlayStation camera. Its been around as technology for a while now. Its not a complete product. What I mean is it needs the proper added something to make it truely useful. That something is Oculus Rift or Morpheus. Together with these things Kinect actually means something. Alone it's just a not so good controller.

Kinect wasn't Microsoft's "most promising product", it really was nothing more than a gimmick made in response to Nintendo's Wii motion control gimmick. I skipped the Kinect when it came out on the 360, had no interest at all (even though I was heavily invested in the 360 and still love it).

And because Microsoft built the XB1 around Kinect 2.0, I just skipped that console completely. I really think that, if Microsoft had put 100% of their effort into the XB1 console itself, instead of watering it down to accommodate the Kinect gimmick, it would be a lot more competitive product today. Instead, they scaled back the base console specs, to make up for the high cost of Kinect 2.0, and it really hurt them, this generation.

"When the Kinect for Xbox 360 was first demonstrated in June 2009, it looked like the future of technology."

It didn't looked like that, it was promised to be that by MS on their marketing efforts full of PR lies and bluff. People fell for that on the hype train and fell for MS PR lies.

We know the history of Microsoft on their marketing campaigns and how much they like to talk and mislead. It happened with the xbox One many times on their famous 180 u turns as is happening now with the "power of the cloud" push.

One day we will all praise a feature like Kinect. Only it's probably not gonna be Kinect. Its gonna be Sonys version ironically. The reason why is they will be using that with it's true application use. Complete Virtual reality immersion of our body. Now I wish it had the technology of the Kinect for this. That is how this tech will properly finally get praise.

Id like to see something come out for it , me and the boy had a blast with the first one on the 360...im still waiting (since launch) for "Xbox On" to work (maybe 1/3 of the time) although "Xbox turn off" works every single time ...why is that I wonder?